The contemporary political imagination and social landscape have been almost overwhelmed by worries about security. These concerns have led to the emergence of a minor industry generating ideas about how to define security, how to defend and improve it, how to civilise and democratise it. In Critique of Security Mark Neocleous takes an entirely different approach. Challenging the common assumption that security is an unquestionable good, Neocleous explores the ways in which security has been used in the service of a vision of social order in which state power and liberal subjectivity become an integral part of human experience. Treating security as a political technology for liberal order-building and engaging with a wide range of thinkers and subject areas - security studies and international political economy; history, law, and political theory; international relations and historical sociology - Neocleous explores the ways in which individuals, classes, and the state have been shaped and ordered according to a logic of security. In so doing, he uncovers the violence that underlies the politics of security, the ideological links between security and emergency powers, and the fetish for security that is dominating modern politics.

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"This is an adventurous and radical book. It is seeking to create new trends in security studies." Barry Buzan, London School of Economics"Challenging and accessible, this book opens up new political questions as it describes the new ways in which life has become more comprehensively securitized." Michael Dillon, politics and international relations, Lancaster University"The author has very creatively brought together the problematique of security and the ways different intellectuals are contributing towards the continuation of this regime." Anna Agathangelou, York University

Mark Neocleous is professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, and a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. His previous books include The Monstrous and the Dead, Imagining the State, The Fabrication of the Social Order, Fascism, and Administering Civil Society.

Critique of Security Mark Neocleous Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 1 'The supreme concept of bourgeois society' : liberalism and the technique of security 11 Security, sovereignty, prerogative 13 Liberty in security and liberal insecurity 24 Prerogative and necessity: towards emergency 32 2 Emergency? What emergency? 39 Martial law to emergency powers 42 Walter Benjamin goes to Senate 59 Against normality 69 3 From social to national security: on the fabrication of economic order 76 The garden of security, or 'Security -this is more like it' 81 Containment I: national security, international order and six million corpses 92 4 Security, identity, loyalty 106 Containment II: national security, domestic order and the fear of disintegration 108 The garden of pansies, or 'no communists or cocksuckers in the library' 123 5 The Company and the Campus 142 Security fetishism 145 Security intellectuals 160 Closing gambit: return the gift 185 Notes 187 Index 243